When the young boy leaves elementary school at the age of 14, it
would be difficult to say what are the most striking features of his character:
incredible ignorance insofar as real knowledge is concerned, or cynical
impudence combined with a negative attitude towards morality. For one of
such a young age, it's enough to make your hair stand on end.
2.10 YOUNG DESPISER OF AUTHORITY
What station in life can such a person fill, to whom nothing is sacred,
and who has never experienced anything noble--on the contrary, who has
been intimately acquainted with the lowest kind of human existence?
This 3-year-old child has become a 1 5-year-old despiser of authority.
He has been acquainted only with moral filth and vileness, and everything
excluded that might stimulate his thought towards higher things.
And now this young man enters the school of life.
He leads the same kind of life that was exemplified for him by his
father during childhood. He hangs around street comers and comes home
at all hours. He occasionally even beats his poor mother. He curses God
and the world, and finally ends up in a juvenile corrections center.
And there he gets his final polish.
And his bourgeois contemporaries are astonished at the lack of
'patriotic enthusiasm' that this young 'citizen' displays.
Day after day, they are all witnesses to the phenomenon of spreading
poison among the people, through the use of theater and cinema, gutter
journalism and obscene books. And yet they are astonished at the
deplorable 'moral standards' and 'national indifference' of the masses. As
if trash cinema, gutter press, and the like could impart knowledge of the
greatness of one's country-quite apart from the earlier education of the
individual.
I then came to understand, quickly and thoroughly, what I had never
been aware of before. It was the following:
The question of 'nationalizing' a people is first and foremost one of
establishing healthy social conditions that will furnish the grounds
necessary for the education of the individual. For only when family
upbringing and school education have imparted to the individual cultural
and economic knowledge and, above all, a sense of the political greatness
of his own country-only then will it be possible for him to feel proud of
being a citizen. I can fight only for something that I love. I can love only
what I respect. And in order to respect something, I must at least have some
knowledge of it.
